Do I need to rebuild the whole project everytime I start Tomcat server?

Question

If I made some changes to the JAVA code, do I need to rebuild the project using maven before I restart the Tomcat server to see the result?

Answer 1

Though server like Tomcat do provide automatic reload of application with new changes, e.g: Automatically publish when resources change, doing a rebuild after any change is considered a good practice as it will eliminate any possibility of missing out on any change implementation.

Also you can use plugins like Spring-Loaded and JRebel that allow reloading of classes while JVM is running.

Also if you are using Spring-Boot, there is an inbuilt module called Dev-tools available from version 1.3, that triggers automatic restart of application once new changes are saved.